Marshall McLuhan and Harvest of Gems

Marshall McLuhan and Harvest of Gems

Dear Team:

We are deep in the middle of Drubchen. This is the Tibetan equivalent of starting up a big psychic reactor and turning on the switch. Mantras are recited 24 hours a day for ten days in order to flush out psychic wastes on the planet. It's intense and sometimes uplifting. Often an ordeal, but psychic waste management is never easy....

The planning for the promotion of Harvest of Gems has forced me to articulate the message of this complex work in a new way. The work of Marshall Mcluhan the Canadian media and communications genius has allowed me to find a new way to make sense of Harvest within a wider Western context.

Mcluhan saw that holistic awareness was crucial in all mandala-like visions. This is now demanded in this information age of media overload. You need to look for the hidden structure of things by focusing on multiple angles and finding new visions through this process. You scan for patterns.

The loss of personal identityi in this increasingly speedy life leads to violence. This loss of identity is now our new collective identity. It's very ironic. Cognition-recognition cycles are speeding up and this creates more angles for understanding this speed-up process. We live now in a world of total resonance. Our public and private space is being invaded at an ever faster rate. But this whole world with its total resonance is also now at your fingertips.

Psychic insurance is needed. It is achieved through art. It engages all the senses. Meditation gives more insurance, but of a spiritual kind. A cognitive and spiritual unity is achieved which can be very flexible. Mandala thinking is instant and symultaneous. This is great. Especially for our dissolving Western civilization. McLuhan explored both sdhaman and inner space through the media by writing in wild juxtapositions. McLuhan was looking for a multi-sensory language for an increasing multi-sensory world. The new media was creating a retribalization and all of us were be thrust together HERE and NOW. The world needed to be remade with all the old senses. McLuhan wrote with a multi-sensory collage/montage style.

The media's effects wre more important often than the content itself. We now need to make the new and not match the old. The new extensions of the media were creating new psychic spaces. As we now plunge into the cyber realms are lives are becoming increasingly psychic. All kinds of boundaries are dissolving. Everything is now immediate as our left-brain world increasingly flips into a right-brain world. Indeed our left-brain worls is being pushed now at the speed of light. This is creating the flip. How much new tribal involvement and how much new private identity?

Reality and the symbol of it. Which is more real nowadays? McLuhan in his writings used free-association to understand the current cognitive speed-up and its space-out effect. McLuhan attempted a massive recalibration and feedback leap in his mind in order to deal with the new realities of the speedy media age. The inner quickness of the mind was being extended outward now to create a high-speed civilization. This is why today people everywhere are looking for new forms of psychic survival in art, ESP, the occult, and meditation. In a very crude way we are now entering the biggest spiritual age of our times. The media and the mind sciences are the new initiations needed for our new psychic world.

McLuhan made intuitive leaps between the jigsaw pieces that he saw. He did not build bridges. There was simply no time for this. McLuhan saw the need for a right-brain strategy for an increasingly right-brain world. Left-brain strategies now just created alethal form of schizophrenia. Symultaneous comprehension was needed now. You needed to look at the invisible around the visible without thinking too much. Divination was replacing logic. McLuhan saw the subliminal as crucial despite its slipperiness. The mind needed to be used as a divination tool.

McLuhan used his personal subconscious in an artistic way to see where the collective " unconscious " was going. Wild juxtapositions led to creative trance and big vision. Resonant intervals led to all directions at once. The senses needed to not be divided. Allcould be remembered and surfed. You didn't stay divided and adrift with this new kind of perception. The content of the old media became visibal in the new media. Right-brain thought thrived on the empty spaces between things. Vision was found there and things could be changed quickly.

So let's leap again:

All mandala-like vision is holistic. This is critical as the speed-up of life goes on along with its massive identity loss. One needs the worlds's resonance at one's finger-tips. Psychic insurance and cognitive unity is gained through art and meditation. This double insurance is not a luxury in today's speedy global world where all minds collide now with increasing frequency at the speed of light. Art and meditation keep black and white stress at bay. Wild juxtapositions of the new psychic spaces generates a multi-sensory language for an increasingly multi-sensory world. Meditation creates sufficient detachment to make this multi-sensory process less exhausting. Our lives are becoming increasingly psychic. We are ALL HERE NOW as the media moves us all at the speed of light. Divination replaces logic. The empty spaces between things is probed with artistic divination and spiritual insurance provides extra protection. The psychic insurance is fortified.

Harvest of Gems is not just a novel with this new context in mind. It is now also a divination tool, a psychic workbook, a work of supreme literary art, and a cultural and spiritual dictionary. Harvest of Gems is a new kind of book for a new kind of age....

It has been such a pleasure working with you all. The Lamas send blessings.

Tashi Shok!

Michael

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